Within the prior art, a shared tenant service is provided by the Lucent Technologoies Definity Telecommunications System. This service allows the owner of a building or shopping mall to purchase a Definity Telecommunications System and to provide telephone services to the tenants of the building. Each tenant pays for a fixed number of wired telephones and access to a fixed number of central office trunks. From the tenant's point of view, the telecommunications switching system appears to be servicing only that tenant. The advantage is that the tenant gains access to a sophisticated telecommunication system having a wide variety of features. Also, the overall cost of obtaining telecommunication service by each tenant is lower.
It has become common for large companies to install personal communication service (PCS) systems in buildings wholly controlled by the corporation. This allows the employees to be constantly available via their PCS telephones and has come into widespread use. However, in a building occupied by multiple tenants, it is not feasible for each tenant to have their own PCS system simply because of the potential for interference between the systems and the added cost of having individual PCS systems. In addition, various tenants may want their PCS service to be throughout the building rather than just in the area leased by the tenant. An example of such a situation is in an airport where each airline wants their employees to be constantly in touch throughout the airport. Also, one tenant may wish to provide PCS service to the employees of all tenants. An example of such a tenant, would be a restaurant or bank located within the building who wishes to provide PCS access as a customer service. For these reasons, a wireless switching system providing shared tenant service in a multi-tenant building appears to be a desired solution. This method is undesirable since the cost of the base stations and the installation of these base stations represents a large cost factor of a wireless switching system. Further, different tenants could well wish to have different levels of service. For example, one tenant might wish its employees to only have wireless service within the portion of the building leased by the tenant; whereas, another tenant may wish to have its employees have access to a base station throughout the building. Each tenant would be charged for each base station to which they have access. U.S. Pat. No. 5,530,945 discloses a wireless shared tenant service. The solution of U.S. Pat. No. 5,530,945 is to allow a wireless terminal to register on any base station; and then if that base station is not accessible to the wireless terminal, drop the wireless terminal from the base station. The problem with this solution is that a wireless telephone owned by an employee who was only authorized for limited use would constantly be attempting registration on base stations on which it could not register. This generates a large amount of administrative traffic for the wireless switching system and also lower the availability of the base stations to authorize wireless terminals.